Ghosts! Gui! Hantu!
What is our fascination with the supernatural?
“To tell a ghost story means being willing to be haunted.”
― Judith “Jack” Halberstam
In one of our more popular episodes, we met up with podcasters Kyle & Wayne of Ghost Maps! They collect real stories from the SEA region and narrate them on their podcast. I got fascinated with this form of podcasting since a friend of mine introduced me to his own podcast whereby the whole essence is not about conversation but rather pure 100% storytelling. A space where I see a massive potential in as the podcasting scene grows globally.
I really really enjoyed this episode because people were excited and interested to bring it up in conversation. Even my cousin living in London, listened to it, and mind you we HARDLY talk long distance aside from sharing memes & lame ass dad jokes, could not help but to call me right away just to share his own personal stories about the Freakyverse.
Kyle also shared with me something I never considered before. It was the “rules” in a sense when talking about Legacy/Curses especially in a person’s family. Something he goes deeper into on the pod but something that just never clicked in my head until he brought it up. It was certainly eye opening and I decided to omit the story I told based on what he said.
From the start, Kyle & Wayne were awesome guests. The vibes were just in sync right away and we just blasted into a different universe sharing all our personal stories about the supernatural. It was almost like we could not help ourselves and just went from story to story. I swear, it could have went on for hours. The jokes were pretty natural & everyone just had a good time…scaring Ivan into running back home to mummy to sleep.
We could tell right away that it was going to be a great episode simply because of the flow of conversation. Something I feel adds a lot to the listener and just something that cannot be planned, scripted or recreated. Sometimes all that awkwardness of sharing stories with strangers just go out the window.
Something I brought up in the episode, was that as children, the truth is, it’s hard to justify if our imaginations are “real” or “fake”. Although dismissed by our parents 9/10 times, when you hear stories of things like this, some children just can’t shake off that feeling they get. This is something that I have personal experience in when I was younger. Also having had so many strange encounters myself, I am confident in the reasons why I do certain things I do as a personal “ritual” of sorts to “drown out” the noise. I do still get these feelings and vibes from time to time but I think as adults, we tend to learn to ignore as much as possible or we probably won’t be able to live normal lives. But imagine those who just dive deep and let that side of their mind go 100%.
“Many people told me such convincing ghost stories that I felt that there really were ghosts, though I hadn’t seen any. And though I still haven’t seen a ghost, I feel that they are all around us; we are just not aware of them being there.’
The funny thing about ghost stories is that it is rarely just about the ghost itself. In a sense. These experiences and stories tend to go much deeper into our cultures, lifestyles, personal mental health, religion and just so so so much more than what we think on the surface.
With this, I started to see that there is so much more meaning & history to why we do things in our daily lives. This is not only cross-cultural but also expands beyond borders globally.
It’s just so unique and magical that during things like The Hungry Ghost month, people would somehow have that thought at the back of the mind. Regardless of all races or religions even, if something creepy were to happen during HGM, most people would attribute it to the supernatural.
“Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading.”
― Robert Aickman
There is just so many more ways we can expand on this topic and we hope to do so having more conversations with Kyle & Wayne in the near future.
Check-out Ghost Maps on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/0iKoHztCnL4pmxkWvwAfKX?si=QxHA3kjqTqSsL5Wm1CdhQA
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https://www.instagram.com/wearehantu/
Website:
https://www.hantu.sg/
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Ernie
